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Because every American
should have access
to broadband Internet.

The Internet Innovation Alliance is a broad-based coalition of business and non-profit organizations that aim to ensure every American, regardless of race, income or geography, has access to the critical tool that is broadband Internet. The IIA seeks to promote public policies that support equal opportunity for universal broadband availability and adoption so that everyone, everywhere can seize the benefits of the Internet - from education to health care, employment to community building, civic engagement and beyond.

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The Podium

Blog posts tagged with 'Global'

Thursday, June 30

The Health of Broadband in America

By Brad

Over at Maximum Entropy, Bret Swanson (who is also an IIA Broadband Ambassador) digs through the 390 pages that make up the OECD’s annual Communications Outlook report. Noting that “in recent times the report has also served as a chance for some to misrepresent the relative health of international broadband markets,” Swanson writes:

The common refrain the past several years was that the U.S. had fallen way behind many European and Asian nations in broadband. The mantra that the U.S. is “15th in the world in broadband” — or 16th, 21st, 24th, take your pick — became a sort of common lament. Except it wasn’t true.

Swanson goes on to write that recent numbers from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index report reveal America leads the world when it comes to the amount of IP traffic generated and consume “both in per user and per capita terms.” That means, according the Swanson, that:

[I]t’s not possible for the U.S. to both lead the world by a large margin in Internet usage and lag so far behind in broadband. We think these traffic per user and per capita figures show that our residential, mobile, and business broadband networks are among the world’s most advanced and ubiquitous.

Swanson’s full post is worth checking out. The Communications Outlook report is available on the OECD’s website.

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Tags: broadband access, traffic, broadband infrastructure, global

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Friday, May 20

The Cost of Broadband

By Brad

At CNet, Lance Whitney points to a new report from the International Telecommunication Union that finds the cost of broadband globally has dropped 50% in just the last two years. That’s the good news. But the drop in prices isn’t reaching every country:

Some of the countries that enjoy the lowest broadband prices relative to their high incomes include the U.S., Austria, Monaco, Macau (China), and Liechtenstein. In all, individuals in 31 highly industrialized countries tend to pay only around 1 percent of the gross national income per capita for basic broadband.

But in 32 countries, people pay more than half the average monthly income for basic broadband. And in a small number of developing countries, basic broadband is more than 10 times the monthly average income. Some of the countries where broadband is beyond the average salary include Tajikistan, Swaziland, Uzbekistan, and Papua New Guinea.

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Tags: broadband access, cost, global

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